The Long Road Through China (Book Preview)

I can’t tell the story of China without first sharing what precipitated my arrival in the People’s Republic.

I had just finished a grandiose cycling tour across half of the United States, one that involved an immense amount of debauchery, a few bike-related mechanical issues, and the consumption of enough Grey Goose to keep the French entity profitable for the next decade.

Following that adventure, I contemplated what to do next as I sat in my parents’ living room one evening, staring blankly at my computer screen and wondering if a longing for the unconventional still burned in my soul.

I found myself aimlessly scrolling through Facebook as Wheel of Fortune played in the background.

Suddenly, an intriguing ad popped up.

“Do you want to live in China?” read the text in big white letters.

My mind instantly shifted to the Great Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests of years ago, and how my Tinder game might fare abroad.

“Yes, I do want to live in China,” I said to myself, then clicked on the shiny blue ad. I was taken to a small web page that required me to fill in some basic information, like birth date, education level, and how much teaching experience I had.

After inputting the information, I was then redirected to another page that said a representative from the company would soon be in touch.

The next night, while staring at the same computer screen, and with Pat Sajak urging a schoolteacher from Delaware to pick a vowel, my phone rang.

It was a Beijing number.

“Holy hell,” I said, my heart racing as I stood up to walk into a back room and silently take the call.

“Hello,” I answered carefully, expecting someone on the other end to reply in a tongue I had never heard before.

“Is this Quentin?” asked a chipper female voice.

“This…is,” I said hesitantly.

“Hi. I am Jane from EF. You filled out an application with us recently, right?”

“Yes, I did. Last night actually.”

“That’s great. The reason for my call tonight is I would like to know if you want to interview for a position as an ESL teacher with our company.”

“Uh, yes. Yes, I would,” I said nervously.

“That’s excellent. Based on your résumé, we think you would make a great candidate, so what I’m going to do is ask you a few brief questions, and then if that goes well, I’ll pass your information along to my supervisor.”

“That sounds good,” I told Jane.

Over the course of the next few minutes, I told her a bit about myself, of course making sure I came off as the type of young man who could lead the Chinese youth toward English fluency.

“This all seems good,” she said at the end of our short conversation. “I’m definitely going to pass your profile along to my team lead, and she will get in touch with you sometime in the next few days.”

Days later, Jane’s superior reached out, and the opportunity to reinvent myself arrived. “Have you ever taught young children before?” the interviewer initially asked.

At the time, the only interaction I had with diminutive, spittle-laden chumps came a few months prior when I was working with a mentally challenged sixth-grader named Fred.

Fred was an importunate little human, constantly kicking me in the flabby part of my right leg, lambasting me when I urged him to do basic arithmetic, but then altogether adoring me when his mood shifted, and he no longer saw me as the devil reincarnated.

Of course, I didn’t tell the person conducting the interview anything about the emotional gymnastics Fred put me through. Instead, I portrayed Fred as a young man in need of a strong masculine presence, showcasing how my arrival in his classroom was beneficial to his long-term outlook in life.

“I do think I had a profound impact on Fred,” I told the interviewer, which was a complete lie, because as I uttered those words, I imagined Fred spreading glue on a wall and later throwing eggs at his neighbor’s garage door.

By the end of the interview, the woman interviewing me was so impressed with my responses that she wondered why I had not already gone into teaching.

“No money in that line of work,” I wanted to tell her, but I still didn’t know how much the job paid, so it made sense to stow away the brazen humor.

“Last question, Quentin: Why do you want to go to China?” she asked.

“Um,” I began, repressing my immediate thoughts of beautiful Chinese women. “I think the architecture would be really interesting, and the Great Wall also seems like a unique place to visit.”

“So cool. A lot of people feel the same way,” the interviewer said, which made me wonder if a lot of other Americans also lied to gain entrance into China.

A few weeks later, I received another phone call. I couldn’t answer because my hands were too busy being scalded by the dishes I was washing in the kitchen of a Mongolian restaurant, but whoever called left a voice mail detailing that EF wanted to hire me and begin the onboarding process of bringing me over to Beijing.

The next morning, the first-degree burns on my hands had healed. I called my mom, giddy with excitement.

“Ni hao,” I said when she answered the phone.

“Huh?” she said back. “Who is this?”

“I just said hello in Chinese. This is your son Quentin by the way.”

“Quent? Oh my. Why would you say such a thing?”

“Because I just got hired to be an English teacher in China.”

“You?” she questioned, the genuine surprise transmitting through the airwaves enough to make me cringe.

“Yes, me,” I responded.

My mom didn’t know what to make of my announcement. A few days later, neither did my father, who had a few choice words regarding my impending departure.

“China is a communist country, Quent,” he said, as if that information would quell my ambitions.

“I’m not the first American to go to China, Dad. I mean, they just hosted the Olympics like a decade ago, so it must be a somewhat normal place.”

“That place is not normal,” he asserted.

He was already convinced of China’s illegitimacy, and that impression appeared irreversible.

“Well, I’m still going to go,” I told him.

He didn’t reply.

“I hear that in China they throw people in prison for jaywalking,” my friend said when I told him I was leaving our divine country.

“That can’t be true,” I told my wayward friend.

“I guess you’ll find out for yourself,” my friend sneered.

“Yeah, I guess I will,” I proudly proclaimed.

**

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